digital marketing

April 8, 2017

In November 2016 Google launched their first experiment with a mobile-first index. While there was no announcement, comments from Googler’s on the mobile-first index team indicated that they expect the launch to be towards the tail end of 2017. However, that does seem unlikely to happen now. At the Next10x conference, Garry Illyes from Google said: “that’s unlikely to happen, at least fully.”

The mobile-first index is the same Google index optimized entirely for mobile devices. With this index, Google will only index content for mobile devices and rank them accordingly. This way, a search on a mobile device is likely to be more context relevant. This index is supposedly going to use mobile metrics more heavily. Mobile design, responsiveness, page load speeds and navigation will all play a part. Sites that do not have a mobile site will see their desktop site ranked the same as before. However, there is a chance that sites with mobile content will rank higher.

This change had a lot of companies, webmasters and optimizers worried. Fortunately, with this delay, anyone who has not setup a mobile version of the website or has a re-design in the works has more time to complete the implementation.

With the majority of search traffic coming from mobile devices, a change in the index that so heavily favors mobile content could mean big changes to rankings.

December 3, 2016

Another user interface paradigm that has grown thanks to smartphones and faster connections are rich animations. It makes the experience more interactive and entertaining while providing functional feedback to the user. The animations need to be placed carefully so that it enhances rather than takes away from the user experience. Animation on websites can be classified in two ways:

Large animation

Unlike small-scale animation described below, these are used for interaction purposes. A basic example would be a hidden menu which appears with a large page shift animation. Another would be where content changes when the mouse cursor hovers over a selection. While not exactly an animation, even the usage of slideshows and galleries to show multiple sets of photographs falls into the large animation category. The most striking example is the background animation. PayPal uses this to good effect.

Small scale animation

These are small animations in size and are used to convey an action of some sort. An example would the loading animation. Depending on how it is used, this can be a progress bar, a spinner. Another example would be motion animation where a product or service is shown in motion on the website. Look carefully the next time you browse and you will a lot of examples of small-scale animation usage.

Most other animation techniques actually use a combination of the two to both lead up to and enhance the larger animation.